One Way

Winner of the Prix Goncourt and chosen by The Seattle Times as one of the Best Books of 2004

Hailed as a marvel and awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize, One-Way recounts the comic, absurd, and all-too-believable adventures of Aziz Kemal, a young Frenchman raised as an Arab by Marseilles gypsies. Arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, Aziz becomes the target of a government campaign to repatriate illegal immigrants and finds himself en route to Morocco, despite the fact that he isn’t Moroccan. Accompanying Aziz is a touchingly naive and neurotic “humanitarian attache” named Jean-Pierre Schneider, who drowns his own personal woes in his zeal to build a new life for his charge in a land neither one has ever seen.

It is on the plane to Morocco that events take an unexpected turn, when Aziz, pressed for details of a “birthplace” that isn’t his, invents the fabulous story of Irghiz, a valley paradise hidden from the world and now in danger of ruin. From this moment on, the attache forgets his original assignment and has only one mission: to return Aziz to the Eldorado he left behind and save it from the ravages of modern progress. So begins an initiatory journey that takes Aziz, Jean-Pierre, and a disabused aristocrat across a desert both real and mythic, pursuing a vision of happiness as elusive as Irghiz itself.

At once humorous and poignant, the story of this journey is “a beautifully realized blend of sensitivity, humor, intelligence, and good sense—a rich and engaging novel, filled with a lucid and compassionate humanity” (Jean-Claude Lebrun).